The standards governing the production of electronic communications and their associated “families” have been undergoing a significant transformation over the past several years. In traditional discovery practice, the production of emails and attachments as a single unit—a document family—is generally a settled production practice with limited exceptions. However, with the advent of cloud-based collaboration and chat tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, certain litigants have sought to expand this practice. This has led to disputes in civil lawsuits over whether documents from cloud-based repositories should be produced in families with emails and other electronic communications that have pointers or hyperlinks to those cloud-based documents. Courts have at times ordered producing parties to turn over hyperlinked documents in families. Nevertheless, courts have declined to find an equivalency between traditional attachments and hyperlinked documents. Nor have courts ordered producing parties to hand over every hyperlinked document in a family with accompanying emails, chats, or text messages. Instead, court production orders are typically limited in nature and circumspect about imposing broad and disproportionate burdens on producing parties. In certain instances, courts have simply declined to order family productions where requesting parties have not established the relevance and proportionality warranting such a production.
These trends showing judicial discretion on the issue of so-called family productions involving hyperlinked documents are reflected in two recent cases: United Association National Pension Fund v. Carvana Company and Yotta Technologies Inc. v. Evolve Bank & Trust.[1] In each case, courts either limited (Pension Fund) or rejected (Yotta) attempts to obtain fulsome family productions of hyperlinked documents. Pension Fund and Yotta signal courts’ expectations that parties adopt reasonable, right-sized positions on family production issues with hyperlinked documents and that they substantiate their positions on the issues with hard information and not simply arguments or speculation.
Pension Fund: Limiting Carvana’s “Family” Production Burden
Pension Fund, which involves putative class claims for violations of securities laws, addressed the parties’ family production dispute in multiple orders.
The August 21, 2025 Order: Testing the Collection Capabilities of the FEC Tool
The court issued an ESI production order in March 2025, indicating that the parties would produce relevant hyperlinked documents in discovery. In that order, the court directed the parties to work cooperatively to determine whether they could automate the collection of hyperlinked documents in a “technologically feasible, reasonable, and not unduly burdensome” manner.
The parties were apparently unable to do so and raised their dispute with the court. The plaintiffs appear to have argued that they were entitled to a family production of all hyperlinked documents that were sent contemporaneously with their underlying emails. Plaintiffs also argued that defendants (Carvana) should not be allowed to withhold the production of any hyperlinked documents—regardless of their relevance—where a pointer to those documents was found in a relevant email. In response, Carvana disagreed and argued that it was unduly burdensome to make a family production of contemporaneous hyperlinked documents. In addition, Carvana maintained that the application the plaintiffs proposed that Carvana use to facilitate such a production was unworkable.
In its August 21, 2025 order, the court directed Carvana to use the plaintiffs’ suggested technology application—the Forensic Email Collector (FEC)—to perform a test collection and thereby determine whether Carvana could accomplish a family production of hyperlinked documents “without undue burden or expense.” The test would require Carvana to run the FEC application (or another tool) for two selected custodians to gauge its effectiveness in automating the collection of contemporaneous hyperlinked documents across all document custodians (25 in total).[2].
The January 12, 2026 Order: Limiting Carvana’s “Family” Production Burden
After Carvana performed the ordered collection using the FEC application, plaintiffs moved to compel Carvana’s compliance with the August 21, 2025 order. Plaintiffs argued (among other things) that Carvana should make a family production of contemporaneous hyperlinked documents using FEC, and if a contemporaneous version was unavailable, then Carvana should produce a subsequent version.
Carvana countered by asserting that FEC was unworkable and offered metrics from its test of the application on two custodians to substantiate its position:
Defendants argued that of 112,889 total emails, FEC was only able to capture 7,592 responsive emails with hyperlinks. Of those 7,592 emails collected, “many [hyperlinked documents] still had modifications after” the date the parent email was sent. In terms of burden, Defendants spent 1,170 hours and over 200,000 dollars using FEC for the 2 ESI custodians. This translated to a $425 per document price tag for using FEC, which was “105 times more expensive” than using traditional ESI discovery techniques. (emphasis added)
Given these findings—which indicated that using FEC on 25 email custodians would be unduly burdensome and disproportionate to the needs of the case—Carvana suggested that any family production requirement be far more limited and proportional.
In response to the parties’ positions, the court conceded that hyperlinked documents were not the logical equivalent of traditional attachments and acknowledged that “courts are loath to treat them interchangeably.” In addition, the court indicated that it needed to balance the plaintiffs’ “broad right to discovery” against the burdens Carvana faced with collecting and producing contemporaneous hyperlinked documents. (emphasis in original)
To address these issues, the court issued a two-part order. First, the court allowed the plaintiffs to select a narrow subset of 250 responsive emails for which defendants would be obligated to run FEC (or otherwise use traditional eDiscovery methods) to obtain the most contemporaneous non-privileged versions of the hyperlinked documents and produce them in families. Second, plaintiffs could select up to 200 hyperlinked documents—once Carvana finishes its document productions—for Carvana to perform a “reverse search” and thereby identify (if possible) their corresponding emails and produce them in “families.”
On the latter issue, the court circumscribed plaintiffs’ demand that Carvana perform a full search of its produced documents for all corresponding parent emails. The court found that plaintiffs had failed to establish the proportionality for such a search and had not demonstrated that it would not be unduly burdensome for Carvana.
Yotta: No Basis for a Family Production of Hyperlinked Documents
In an omnibus discovery order, the court—in this litigation over the “collapse” of the plaintiff’s (Yotta) business—denied Yotta’s motion to compel the defendant (Evolve) to make a family production of hyperlinked documents. In a terse ruling, the court declined to find equivalency between hyperlinked documents and attachments, opining that a “hyperlink relationship . . . does not by itself mean the linked document should be treated as an attachment and produced.” While a family production of hyperlinked documents “may be appropriate” in certain circumstances, the court observed that such requests should be individually justified and “should not be made as a matter of routine.” Applying these principles to the instant motion, the court determined that Yotta failed to substantiate the requested family production of hyperlinked documents since it merely argued that the hyperlinked documents at issue were “important.”
Right-Sizing Expectations for Family Productions of Hyperlinked Documents
Pension Fund and Yotta signal a continuing trend that courts will not authorize party requests requiring so-called family productions for all electronic communications with pointers to hyperlinked documents. This was abundantly clear in both Yotta, where the court dispensed with Yotta’s unsupported demand, and Pension Fund, where the court restricted the use of the FEC application and curtailed the reverse search of Carvana’s emails. Yotta is particularly instructive on this trend since—despite its sympathy toward plaintiffs’ position—the court relied on proportionality standards to rein in plaintiffs’ demands.
Requesting Parties
Pension Fund and Yotta demonstrate that parties must right-size their expectations surrounding family productions of hyperlinked documents. For requesting parties, this means focusing on high-value hyperlinked documents and setting aside demands that all hyperlinked documents be produced in families. In addition, requesting parties should be prepared to establish both the proportionality and the need for any such productions of hyperlinked documents. Both of these cases establish that parties who fail to do so will find their requests either curtailed or rejected in their entirety. Nevertheless, requesting parties that establish the relevance, proportionality, and reasonableness of their requests will likely find a receptive audience from courts that appreciate the need for “knowing ‘who knew what and when,’” so long as they are not unduly burdensome.
Producing Parties
Producing parties should, in turn, determine whether document custodians are using pointers in their emails and chats, and if so, explore the technical capabilities and projected costs of producing those communications and hyperlinked documents.
Producing parties should also be prepared for orders that may not be entirely clear or reasonable in their scope. For example, in the portion of its January 12 order addressing the FEC collection of contemporaneous hyperlinked documents, Pension Fund remarked that Carvana was obligated to produce “any and all responsive parent emails and their hyperlinked attachments to Plaintiffs.” The nature of Carvana’s production obligation regarding “hyperlinked attachments” is unclear. Does it include instances where hyperlinks point to one or a few documents? Or would it also include all documents (regardless of their relevance to the claims or defenses) in a linked folder or other cloud repository? Such ambiguity from the Pension Fund ruling spotlights the need for producing parties to seek clarity on the nature and scope of these productions, either through negotiations with requesting parties or through further motion practice.
[1] United Ass’n Nat’l Pension Fund v. Carvana Co., No. CV-22-02126-PHX-MTL, 2026 WL 80189 (D. Ariz. Jan. 12, 2026); Yotta Techs. Inc. v. Evolve Bank & Tr., No. 24-CV-06456-TLT, 2026 WL 172502 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 22, 2026).
[2] United Ass’n Nat’l Pension Fund v. Carvana Co., No. CV-22-02126-PHX-MTL, 2025 WL 2419953 (D. Ariz. Aug. 21, 2025).
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